A piece of small intestine showing typhoid lesions: two figures. Watercolour.

Handwritten text in Wellcome Library files, possibly written by Dr William C. Gibson: "The drawings illustrate a portion of small intestine. On the left, haemorrhagic ulceration is seen through the thickness of the wall. On the right the intestine has been opened to expose the mucosa. In this lies a haemorrhagic ulcer. In Willis Pharmaceutice rationalis (1678), in the section on putrid fevers, Willis writes: "A dysentery is a distemper frequent in continual feavers ... The cause of it is wont to be ... a certain infection impressed on the blood and so intimately confused with it ... that it cannot be pulled away from the blood; wherefore the thrusting forwards towards the intestines unlocks the little mouths of the arteries and makes there little ulcers and exudations and flowings forth of the blood ...". Willis describes cases of such fever (possibly typhoid) in 1656-8, whilst he was working with Christopher Wren. This drawing is probably from such a case."

Letter to the Wellcome Institute from Alasdair Coles, Pembroke College Oxford, 3 October 1986, reports the opinion of a pathologist at Glasgow University, that the drawing "almost certainly represents typhoid fever of the lower ileum. It would have been common at the time and is typically described as showing shallow longitudinal ulcers which in fact lie over the Peyer's patches. I think I can see 3 such ulcers in [the] two segments. Page 631 of Muir's Textbook of pathology shows this well; I think I can see the swollen lymphoid follicles, illustrated in Fig. 19.57, on [the] right-hand specimen, in the brown segment at the top. There are two well circumscribed nodules just adjacent to the ulcer. In my opinion, you can be confident that this picture does illustrate typhoid lesions in the small intestine"

[between 1900 and 1999?]

1 painting : watercolour ; image 14.8 x 20.2 cm

Thomas Willis ; Chr. Wren Lettered in ink by an unidentified hand with names of Thomas Willis (upper left) and Christopher Wren (lower right). The name of Wren is similar in form to Christopher Wren's signature on a letter of 1682 reproduced in Downes, op. cit., p. 57

Attributed to Thomas Willis and Christopher Wren, on the evidence of the names written on the sheet, but the attribution may be doubted

William C. Gibson, 'The bio-medical pursuits of Christopher Wren', Medical history, 1970, vol. 14 (as by Thomas Willis and Christopher Wren)

Kerry Downes, Sir Christopher Wren, an exhibition, London 1982, pp. 46-47, no. 6

Anthony Gerbino and Stephen Johnston, Compass and rule: architecture as mathematical practice in England, 1500-1750, New Haven 2009, pp. 89 (reproduced), 91, 181 (catalogue checklist no. 40)

Wellcome Collection 570945i